Your First Week with Leaftide

The three paths

After onboarding, Leaftide presents three ways to get started. "Help me choose" lets you browse curated garden plans and adopt one that fits your space and experience. "I know what I'm growing" opens a plant search so you can add something specific. "Design my space" takes you straight to the plot designer to draw beds and plan your layout.

All three lead to the same place: plants in your garden with predictions and care tasks. Pick whichever feels natural.

After your first plant

Once you add a plant, things start happening. Predictions appear on your Coming Up dashboard, showing when each lifecycle stage is expected (germination, transplanting, harvest). Care tasks generate automatically based on the plant's needs. The plant's own page shows its lifecycle stages and current progress.

Your dashboard becomes a daily check-in point.

The planning board

Plants you've added but haven't started growing yet live on the Planning Board. This is where you adjust dates, change the starting method, or remove something before committing. Once you record your first event for a plant (sowing, planting out), it moves from the Planning Board to Active.

Think of the Planning Board as your draft and Active as your live garden.

Check your location

Predictions are powered by climate data: growing degree days, frost windows, and local temperature normals. If predictions seem off or vague, check Settings, then Garden, then Location & Climate.

You can reset frost dates from historical data there, which recalculates your entire schedule. Getting this right makes a big difference in prediction accuracy.

The plot designer

Once you have a couple of plants, you might want to lay out your garden visually. The plot designer lets you draw beds, place plants, and see spacing at a glance. There's a dedicated guide for it with video walkthroughs: Plot Designer Guide.

What comes next

As you garden, Leaftide shows coaching tips at the right moments: how to record events, set up the weekly digest, and try the plot designer. The guide page has answers to common questions as they come up.

The more you log (confirmed stages, care tasks completed, journal entries), the more accurate and useful the app becomes over time.